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8 - Legal Dissonances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2014

Morris B. Hoffman
Morris B. Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
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Summary

People crushed by laws have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies of the law.

Edmund Burke

The Naturalistic Fallacy: Mind the Gap

As any trial lawyer or trial judge will tell you, there are a handful of cases where the law requires jurors to follow rules that seem especially hard for them to follow. These are not cases about difficult factual determinations, such as whether the sex was consensual in a “he-said/she-said” rape case, or even whether a defendant had a certain required state of mind. Instead, there are some legal rules that jurors have trouble with because they just don't seem to believe in them. Blackstone's “pious perjury” is an example. Jurors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England simply did not believe that citizens should be put to death for certain relatively minor crimes, and therefore regularly acquitted them of the charged crime and convicted them of a less serious crime that did not carry the death penalty.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Punisher's Brain
The Evolution of Judge and Jury
 , pp. 251 - 271
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

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  • Legal Dissonances
  • Morris B. Hoffman, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: The Punisher's Brain
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139811873.009
Available formats
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  • Legal Dissonances
  • Morris B. Hoffman, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: The Punisher's Brain
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139811873.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Legal Dissonances
  • Morris B. Hoffman, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book: The Punisher's Brain
  • Online publication: 05 May 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139811873.009
Available formats
×